"From Campeche to Boston: Manuel Jala and an Afro-Mexican Challenge to Colonial Slavery"

Abstract:

In January 1709, Manuel Jala, a free Afro-Mexican sailor from Campeche, appeared before the authorities of colonial Massachusetts to prevent his sale into slavery. Captured during imperial warfare in the Gulf of Mexico and illegally sold in New York, Jala spent years in bondage before bringing his case to Boston. This presentation reconstructs his remarkable journey from freedom to enslavement and examines the legal arguments advanced on his behalf. Drawing on petitions, court records, and maritime documents, I argue that Jala’s case reveals a little-known pattern in the Atlantic world: the enslavement of free Afro-Spanish men in British North America. At the center of the story is a sophisticated attack on slavery grounded in natural law, the law of nations, and Christian principles of liberty. The presentation also explores the likely involvement of Samuel Sewall, author of The Selling of Joseph (1700), the first antislavery tract printed in British North America. By recovering Jala’s struggle for freedom, this talk highlights the role of Afro-descended people not merely as victims of slavery but as active participants in its early legal and ideological challenge.

About Beatriz Carolina Peña:

Beatriz Carolina Peña specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a later focus on race, slavery, and maritime worlds in the early modern Atlantic. She is the author of nine books, including seven award-winning monographs originally published in Spanish and two expanded English-language editions published in 2025. Her work on the early colonial Andes has received major awards in Peru, Mexico, Cuba, Spain, and the United States.
Her research on the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean and British America has also earned international recognition, including the 2023 Willi Paul Adams Award from the Organization of American Historians and two Gold Medals for Best Academic Themed Book from the International Latino Book Awards. Her most recent publications examine Afro-Spanish and Indigenous mariners captured and enslaved in the English colonies, recovering overlooked histories of race, empire, and resistance in the Atlantic world. 
Her work has been supported by the John Carter Brown Library and the CUNY Black, Race, and Ethnic Studies Initiative (BRESI). In 2025, she received the Alumni Achievement Award from The Graduate Center, CUNY, becoming the first recipient from the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures (LAILAC) to receive this distinction.

"Temporality, Text, and Borders: The American Revolution in Black Atlantic History"

Abstract:

In recent years, public and scholarly attention has returned to the role of slavery and the agency of the enslaved in the history of the American Revolution. In light of the semisesquicentennial, this presentation considers the history and legacies of the American Revolution from the perspective of Black Atlantic studies. By revisiting the major questions and debates about slavery and the Revolution in light of trans-Atlantic histories of Black marronage, rebellion, and revolution in the long eighteenth-century, it reconsiders three main themes in American Revolutionary studies: borders, founding documents, and the nature of historical time. An emphasis on space, text, and temporality grounded in a study of Black Atlantic marronage, rebellion, and revolution promises to reorient the historiography of the American Revolution toward the enduring practices of unfreedom that undergird the afterlives of slavery and colonialism.

About Bradley Craig:

Bradley L. Craig is an assistant professor of history and African American and Black Diaspora Studies at Boston University, where he teaches courses on Black Atlantic and African American history, historical memory, and gender and sexuality studies. After receiving a PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, he was a Barra postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and assistant professor of history at Concordia University (Montreal). His writing has been published or is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies, Religious Studies Review, and the edited volume American Violence: Histories, Structures, and Legacies.

"All Who Cannot Be Taken Had Better Be Shot By the Creek Indians: Muscogees, Marronage, and the Contested Meanings of the American Revolution"

Abstract:

On March 14, 1776, just four months before Continental rebels signed their declaration of independence from the British Crown, Col. Stephen Bull worked feverishly to curtail a parallel movement for autonomy among a group of two-hundred or so fugitive slaves congregated on Tybee Island. “The matter is this,” he wrote to South Carolina Council of Safety President Henry Laurens. “It is far better for the public and owners, if the deserted negroes on Tybee Island… be shot, if they cannot be taken.” This was, as far as Bull was concerned, the only measure the Continentals could take if they wanted to prevent “our own money or property” from enlisting among the enemy British. But he also added an extra wrinkle to his plan: “all who cannot be taken, had better be shot by the Creek Indians, as it perhaps, may deter other negroes from deserting.” In other words, Bull saw the Tybee crisis as an opportunity to solidify Continental rule within the boundaries of South Carolina and well beyond. Who were these “willing and desirous” Muscogees? How prevalent was their slave hunting within the Revolutionary Era? And what do their experiences and actions reveal about the larger meanings of the American Revolution—of the pursuits of freedom, autonomy, and independence—across and beyond Native country? This presentation thus explores how Indigenous histories often complicate and disrupt both popular and scholarly representations of the American Revolution.

About Paul Barba:

Paul Barba (Ph.D., U.C. Santa Barbara) is an associate professor of history and affiliate faculty of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University.  He is the author of the prize-winning book, Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), and the editor of Gulf South Rebels, Insurgents, and Revolutionaries, 1700-1860: Bonds of Rebellion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). He also is co-editor of the University of Nebraska Press series Borderlands and Transcultural Studies and the Bloomsbury Publishing series Understanding Marronage: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Engagements.

"Reproducing Empire: Gender, Political Ecologies, and Indigenous Slavery in the Revolutionary Gulf South"

Abstract:

In the winter of 1765–66, two French traders trafficked Indigenous captives from Pawnee territory down the Red River into the lands of the Atakapa, including a young girl of eleven years and five months of age. By the time she arrived, Angélique's small body was visibly pregnant—a consequence of her captivity. Although she did not survive, her daughter, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren remained enslaved through Louisiana's transition from French to Spanish rule and its incorporation into the nascent United States. What does the history of one enslaved family reveal about the larger meanings of the American Revolution in the Gulf South?

The enslavement of Indigenous women and girls was central to the reproduction of empire. As ecologies were remade through captive-taking, plantation expansion, and the redrawing of imperial borders, colonial regimes simultaneously sought to reorganize Indigenous kinship and land through racial reclassification and the hereditary transmission of enslaved status. Political, environmental, and gendered violence were not separate processes but, instead, mutually constitutive projects meant to secure colonial claims to land, labor, and sovereignty. This presentation argues that, when viewed from the Gulf South, the American Revolution appears less as the birth of a nation than as an imperial transition that reproduced colonial power through the remaking of Indigenous political ecologies and kinship, revealing how political, environmental, and gendered violence became lived and embodied across generations.

About Leila K. Blackbird:

Leila K. Blackbird (Ph.D., Univ. of Chicago) is the Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in History at Brown University, where she is currently working on her first book, Embodied Violence: Slavery and Settler Colonialism on America's Third Coast. Her research reinterprets the intertwined histories of settler colonialism and slavery in the Gulf South and has been featured in The Cambridge History of the American Revolution, Louisiana Creole Peoplehood, and What Is History, Now?, as well as in the journals Eighteenth-Century Studies, Scholarly Editing, and The William and Mary Quarterly. Her article, “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769–1803,” received the Omohundro Institute’s New Voices Award.

"In a Country Where Slavery Is Forbidden”: Slavery, Conquest, and the United States Army in Indian Country"

Abstract:

During the early nineteenth century, the United States army turned to slavery to maintain hierarchies of race, class, and gender in the nation’s borderlands. The Department of War sanctioned officers’ slaveholding through its body-servant policy, which subsidized the use of enslaved servants. Officers and their wives, in turn, enlisted the labor of the people they enslaved to domesticate the nation’s hinterlands. At the same time, the use of slave labor at military posts exposed the army’s weaknesses to Native and non-Native observers as slaveholding officers entrenched a system of unfree labor that undermined the federal government’s expressed visions for the region. This talk uses a pair of freedom suits lodged against army officers in the 1830s to examine the contours of army slavery. While the two freedom seekers gained their freedom by turning the army’s demand for mobile labor against the officers who enslaved them, their cases did little to dislodge the institution of army slavery. 

About Vivien Tejada:

Vivien Tejada is an Assistant Professor of History at UCLA and an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her book manuscript, Unfree Soil: Indigenous North America and the Coming of the Civil War, argues that the federal government utilized slave labor to colonize the Upper Midwest. She received the 2026 McNeil Center for Early American Studies dissertation prize for this research.

"Black Girls and Their Libraries: Educational Manuals and Literary Access in Early America"

Abstract:

This paper examines early Black writers’ incorporation of educational manuals into their texts, including reference books, penmanship guides, copybooks, and spelling books. I argue that these instructional texts functioned as informal libraries through which Black girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gained literacy, cultivated intellectual authority, and accessed knowledge. By reconceptualizing educational manuals as libraries, this paper reveals how Black girls engaged portable collections of texts that shaped their development as readers and writers.
As a case study, I examine Phillis Wheatley’s iconic girlhood image in the frontispiece to her 1773 collection of poems. While Wheatley inaugurated the Black American literary tradition and the Black women’s literary tradition through the publication of her poetry, she also established an important visual tradition linking Black girlhood, literacy, and library access. Wheatley’s frontispiece models visually what early American penmanship manuals taught theoretically. Her poised posture, writing implements, and manuscript page signal expertise of the handwriting practices that eighteenth-century educational manuals sought to cultivate.
Reading Wheatley’s frontispiece alongside early penmanship and instructional texts illuminates the informal libraries that shaped Black girls’ intellectual lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The image conveys that a Black girl can be a scholar, a writer, and a practitioner of refined literary and penmanship skills, which were capacities that eighteenth-century culture often reserved for white men. To consider Wheatley as a writer and penwoman, learner and author is to recover the educational resources and library practices that enabled Black girls to claim literary authority. Wheatley made that authority visible to future generations, offering a model of Black girlhood grounded in literacy, learning, and intellectual achievement. Her image reveals that Black girls' libraries were not merely collections of books but sites where literary futures were imagined and made possible.

About Nazera Zadiq Wright:

Dr. Nazera Sadiq Wright is an Associate Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which won the 2018 Children’s Literature Association’s Honor Book Award for Outstanding Book of Literary Criticism. In 2019, she was elected to the American Antiquarian Society. Fellowships through the National Humanities Center, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Bibliographical Society of America, and the American Philosophical Society funded archival research for her second book manuscript in progress, Early African American Women Writers and Their Libraries, which is under contract with UNC Press.

"Indentured Child Laborers in Revolutionary Boston"

Abstract:

Pauper apprenticeship, a widespread practice in England and British North America in the 1600s and 1700s, took orphaned and poor children from their birth families and put them into the homes of more prosperous residents, where they would grow to adulthood.  In exchange for the children’s daily labor, masters were expected to provide the necessities of life, plus basic work skills and rudimentary literacy education.  Local magistrates wanted to keep these children off public welfare.  Masters wanted to add a laborer to the household for 10-12 years (the average age at binding was 9). This presentation follows a cohort of 173 pauper apprentices who were bound out by Boston town magistrates before the Revolutionary War and set free by their masters during the war.  The trail of evidence in the children’s indentures and other documents intersects repeatedly with well-known events of the American Revolution.  Their stories suggest there is still much to learn about the ways Revolutionary events affected the lives of ordinary people in Boston and New England.

About Ruth Wallis Herndon:

Ruth Wallis Herndon is Professor Emerita of History at Bowling Green State University.  Her research field is early American social history, with a special focus on marginalized people.  Her major publications include a monograph on the transient poor, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001) and an essay on women in the Boston Almshouse in the Journal of the Early Republic (2012).  With Narragansett tribal ethnohistorian Ella Wilcox Sekatau, she co-authored several essays, including the prizewinning “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era” in Ethnohistory (1997).  With economic historian John E. Murray, she co-authored an essay on the political economy of pauper apprenticeship in the Journal of Economic History (2002) and the anthology Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009).  Her current project, from which her CHE presentation is drawn, is “Children of Misfortune: The Fates of Boston’s Poor Apprentices,” which traces the lives of children bound out by Boston’s magistrates between 1678 and 1820.

"Black Children's Rage Against Criminalization as Abolitionist Praxis"

Abstract:

In this talk, I define rage as an intense expression of anger that, in these cases, was violent. Black children’s violence is far more expansive than what we as adults might consider to be immature and uncontrolled outbursts. Instead, I center Black child-rage as a category of analysis and argue that such a framework demonstrates radical rejections of criminalization.

The historical experiences of Black children and youth demonstrate how formative they were to the development of radical Black resistance and Black knowledge-production, particularly concerning decriminalization and abolitionism. Further, such a framework on Black child-rage allows us to look towards children and youth for a way to both reconcile with, and also mobilize from, the conditions of Blackness both historically and today, to which James Baldwin prophetically reflected, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Within this lens of focusing on the moments in which Black children abandoned restraint, in the face of and in spite of adult-centered ideas of self-control, rage becomes a constructive force and instructive method.

About Crystal Lynn Sheffield:

Crystal Lynn Sheffield is an award-winning historian and educator. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on Black children in early America and has been supported by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Association for American University Women.

Her book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North was published in 2021 by the University of North Carolina Press and won the biennial book prize by the Library Company of Philadelphia. She is currently completing her second book, Condemned: How America’s First Courts and Prisons Terrorized Black Children by The New Press. Additionally, her writing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York York Times.

"When the Declaration of Independence Was News"

Abstract:

Highlighting research from her new book, Dr. Sneff will explore the dissemination of the Declaration around the Atlantic in the summer and fall of 1776. The Declaration was met with unique circumstances everywhere it went, and people modified and critiqued the text along the way. The questions of who experienced the news of independence, when, and how reveal an expansive and complex history of a critical moment in the American Revolution.

About Emily Sneff:

Dr. Emily Sneff is an early American historian and leading expert on the Declaration of Independence. She earned her Ph.D. in History from William & Mary. She is a consulting curator for exhibitions marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration at the Museum of the American Revolution and Historic Trappe.

"Enslaved Afro-Virginian Women in a Revolutionary World"

Abstract:

Virginia’s Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, declared liberty to rebel-owned enslaved men willing to reach British lines and join his Ethiopian Regiment. Unbeknownst to Dunmore, hundreds of enslaved Afro-Virginian women joined his ranks over the next nine months. The American Revolution provided Black women the greatest chance to escape bondage until the U.S. Civil War. Joining Dunmore’s Black recruits, though, were numerous Loyalist owned enslaved women, whose enslavers left Virginia as opposed to remaining on land and sustaining assaults from Patriot forces and citizens of the Tidewater. “Loyalist-Owned Enslaved Afro-Virginian Women in a Revolutionary World,” explores the labors and lived experiences of enslaved women bound by White Loyalist-Virginians. My presentation will underscore how enslaved women’s labor contributed not only to socially reproducing the social worlds of their enslavers but also to how their presence behind British lines in British-controlled cities undermined the possibilities for Afro-Virginians voluntarily choosing to seek refuge behind British lines.

About Adam McNeil:

Adam Xavier McNeil is an Assistant Professor of American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. McNeil is a historian of the American Revolution, with a focus on Black women's experiences in the Revolutionary and Founding Eras. He is currently writing his first monograph, Contested Liberty: Fugitive Women and the Shadow of Reenslavement and Displacement in Revolutionary Virginia, under contract with the University of Virginia Press. Contested Liberty is the first book to analyze Afro-Virginian women’s pursuit of freedom during the American Revolution. McNeil's scholarly contributions can also be found as a co-host of both New Books in African American Studies and New Books in Revolutionary America, podcasts platformed by the New Books Network.

Before coming to Notre Dame, McNeil was a postdoctoral research associate and lecturer at the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. McNeil also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Black Military Studies and previously held leadership positions in the Association of Black Women's Historians and the African American Intellectual History Society.

Date/Time: Monday, February 23, 2026, 3:30-5:30 PM 

Location: University Hall, Room 14

Panelists:  
Jeff Eden, Associate Professor of History, Northwestern University
Sun Joo Kim, Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History, Harvard University

Moderator: Ahmad Sikainga, Professor of History, The Ohio State University

Sponsors: International Studies, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, and the Hilandar Library

Note: This presentation will not be filmed.

Date/Time: Monday, March 23, 2026, 4-5:30 PM 

Location: University Hall, Room 14

Presenter: Don J. Wyatt, John M. McCardell, Jr. Distinguished Professor, Middlebury College

Co-sponsors: International Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures

Date/Time: Monday, April 13, 2026, 4-5:30 PM 

Location: University Hall, Room 14

Presenter: Tracy K. Dennison, Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Social Science History and the Ronald and Maxine Linde Leadership Chair in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology

Co-sponsor: International Studies

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SoundCloud Podcast:

Date/Time: Monday, October 6, 2025, 3:30-5:30 PM

Panelists:
Peter Hunt, Professor of Classics, University of Colorado-Boulder
Gabriel Kruell, Research Associate, Institute of Historical Research at National Autonomous University of Mexico
Paloma Martinez-Cruz, Professor of Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies, The Ohio State University 

Moderator: Bert Harrill, Professor of History, The Ohio State University

Co-sponsors: International Studies, the Center for Folklore Studies, the Humanities Institute, the Department of Classics, and the Center for Latin American Studies

Location: Journalism Building, Room 360, 242 W. 18th Ave., Columbus
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YouTube Video:

SoundCloud Podcast:

Date/Time: Monday, November 3, 2025, 4-5:30 PM

Presenter: Ceyda Karamursel, Lecturer in the Department of History at SOAS, University of London

Location: Journalism Building, Room 360, 242 W. 18th Ave., Columbus
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Co-sponsors: International Studies, the Hilandar Library, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the Center for Ethics and Human Values, and the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures
 

YouTube Video:

SoundCloud Podcast:

Date/Time: Monday, December 1, 2025, 4-5:30 PM

Presenter: Christopher Paolella, Valencia College

Co-sponsor: International Studies and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Location: Journalism Building, Room 360, 242 W. 18th Ave., Columbus
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